Secret from 023: Cultivating Entrepreneurs & Start-Ups

This month’s podcast episode features David Camerlengo, Trade and Investment Commissioner for North America for Queensland, Australia. David shares about their Hot DesQ program for start ups to have a cultivating environment. Check out the snippet below:

There’s one program, which I really like, called Hot DesQ. Because it’s Queensland, we changed the ‘K’ to ‘Q’ for Queensland. What it is – we brought a lot of our accelerators, coworking spaces, our community leaders together, like physically together in different spaces. So we actually built a place called The Precinct, which is in Brisbane where we brought these entities together to encourage greater collaboration. But what we also recognized is while we got some great ideas and some great people that’s quite capable at taking some of these ideas to market, we don’t always have all of the answers.

So a program called Hot DesQ is entirely there to encourage founders and startups and even expat Australians from all around the world to come and spend six to 12 months in Queensland. They get up to $100,000 in funding to work on a venture that perhaps might have some alignment in Australia or perhaps that organization or that startup might already be looking at Australia or perhaps the Asian specific region. So they get $100,000. They come and work in Queensland for 12 months on their venture at one of these accelerators or coworking spaces with one big caveat, and that is that they contribute and give back to the community.

So they have to provide mentorship. They have to share and perhaps try to inspire some of the other entrepreneurs there as well. So we’re trying to bring in this expertise, that experience from all around the world. So that program, the hot desq program, we just ran the second round of that program last year. We had I think 29 startups from all around the world come and spend some time in Queensland for that six to 12 month period. I think we had about five or so from the U.S. and two from Canada and a handful from Silicon Valley as well that are spending some time there. So we’re really about trying to build up the expectations and capabilities locally but also bring some of that capabilities from all around the world to connect our startups and entrepreneurs with the globe.